The rise of interest in multimedia DBMS (MMDBMS) is a recognition of the need for the DBMS approach to manage multimedia information while seeing also that multimedia content has features that are difficult to efficiently support in today's systems. As the web architecture evolves to support streaming multimedia, MMDBMS will play a significant role in supporting multimedia document repositories, digital libraries, and multicast streaming document delivery models. The purpose of this mini-track is to provide a forum by which researchers and practitioners who are focusing on the design and application of multimedia databases can present current work in a workshop-style atmosphere. This track will offer participants access to current research on other related software technologies. Multimedia DBMS are an emerging and strategicially important software technology. The proposed mini-track intersects with the Software Technology Track in the areas of Multimedia and QOS as well as the WWW. Multimedia DBMS.
Today's commercial databases are designed for efficient retrieval of text information. It is well-known that multimedia content's large size, temporal characteristics, and media-specific representation are not well-matched with either RDBMS or OODBMS. There is a large range of work, including content-based retrieval, document query languages, temporal models, integration of the database with a multimedia file system and multimedia middleware, etc. that addresses the limitations of conventional DBMS.
Multimedia and the Web.
The WWW architecture was not designed for multimedia delivery. However, much recent work is trying to change this situation. At the protocol level, several new Internet protocols for stream control, resource reservation, and stream monitoring are either being deployed or close to standardization. At the document model level, there is a recent W3C draft release for a synchronized multimedia integration language (SMIL) based on XML. Further VRML 97 supports multimedia objects and Java has a new set of packages for multimedia support. These technology trends all suggest that the multimedia capabilities of the Web are moving forward at a rapid rate. MMDBMS and the Web.
It is common practice for commercial web sites to use DBMS to organize content delivery. The mini-track will look at new technologies in the MMDBMS area that will extend the capabilities of this integration.
Some of the interesting syngergies include:
1. Multimedia document delivery using a MMDBMS and a streaming web server
The MMDBMS is used to store a collection of multimedia documents and their relationships. Documents are delivered incrementally from the MMDBMS in response to a query, and are sent to the client via one or more streams that are defined at the network level. The end-to-end connection supports application control of QOS in term of load balancing and fault tolerance when it is needed. The structure of the multimedia document is stored in the database and can be queried. The MMDBMS may be integrated with stream-aware file system to support end-to-end QOS delivery guarantees.
2. Meta data frameworks for the web and their use in queries
There are several proposals for incorporating meta-data within the document model, the most ambitious appears to be the W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF). The meta-data may be stored in the DBMS and used for document queries.The meta-data may refer to multimedia attributes or content.
3. Push Technology, Multimedia Content, Channel Composition
There are different notions of push technology, but one of the popular conceptions is selective content distribution to clients based on a subscription to a "channel". Push technology is synergistic with the protocols to support media streaming from web servers. On the delivery side, composition of push channels benefits from a MMDBMS approach.
4. Collaborative Filtering of Web Documents and Query Languages
Collaborative filtering is one term that refers to web services that organize content according to communities of interest. Collaborative filtering is a type of retrieval problem, and collaborative filtering for multimedia information is a content based retrieval problem. The description of filters in terms of query languages is a natural use of MMDBMS.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
. A 300-word abstract by March 16 submission to minitrack-7@rd.nacsis.ac.jp
. Feedback to author on abstract by April 15 . Instructions to Authors